The case relates to an interview the politician gave to South Korean media while in self-imposed exile in 2015.

South Korean performer has won praise at home for boosting Buddhism, but Southeast Asia has been less welcoming.

Test how closely you have been paying attention to what has been going on over the past seven days.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol says semiconductors are 'a field of national all-out war'.

When we meet Jin, the protagonist of R. O. Kwon’s new novel, Exhibit, the 29-year-old photographer is in a holding pattern: For months, she’s been incapable of producing a single image she wants to keep. Joining this creative atrophy is a new, existential gulf in her marriage: Philip, her husband, suddenly wants a child, and no part of Jin echoes the sentiment. Such disconnects might prompt a person on the cusp of their 30s to seek the guidance of friends, a therapist, or perhaps religion—time-honored, if also unexciting, options for someone invested in resolving their personal or marital conflicts. Jin, however, finds herself taking a very different route. Early in Exhibit, she goes from privately nursing her frustrations to sharing them with an alluring stranger. In place of confusion, she begins to feel something that had been eluding her: intense, exhilarating desire.

Philip hadn’t just presented Jin with a surprising new wish to have a child; he’d also been struggling to indulge one of her emergent longings. “Philip, I wish you’d hurt me,” she says early in the novel. While Philip strains to understand why Jin might want to engage in BDSM, the stranger Jin confides in is not a newcomer to the practice. Lidija Jung, an injured ballerina Jin met through a mutual friend, eagerly accepts Jin’s need to be submissive—to derive pleasure from pain being inflicted on her by someone she trusts—with eager acceptance. Stern and daring, she ushers Jin into the world of kink, a foray that reignites the frustrated photographer’s creativity. Their escalating intimacy becomes a container for Jin’s guilt over the yearnings she doesn’t feel, and an accelerant for the ones she does.  

Like most affairs, the illicit relationship at the center of Kwon’s novel does not actually begin with sex. Jin has been hiding the conflict in her marriage from her loved ones, but it’s one of the first secrets she admits to Lidija—the only other Korean American woman at a friend’s party. The pull she feels toward Lidija is instantaneous and impossible to ignore. In her memory of their first encounter, Jin recalls Lidija sticking out as though a spotlight is shining on her—“this large halo, glaring like a path to the sun.” In a conversation that begins poolside and stretches late into the night around a firepit, Jin divulges her artistic ambitions and erotic desires. “Lidija’s life had but slight overlap with mine,” she thinks. “I might risk being honest.” But any distance between the women is short-lived, and the risk wildly underestimated.

Soon, Jin’s life revolves almost entirely around Lidija, who gives Jin space to explore her interest in kink without fear of judgment. Complicating the tidy moral boxes of a straightforward infidelity story, Exhibit takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting. At times, the sheer ferocity of Jin’s desire is uncomfortable to read. But the novel doesn’t demand a reader’s approval of Jin’s cheating; whether she is justified in hurtling toward her urges matters less than the spectacle of her craving. Searching and introspective, Exhibit reflects some of the same social issues that Kwon has addressed in her nonfiction—the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the constant, destabilizing threat of violence against Asian women. Kwon presents these concepts as barriers to self-discovery: Jin’s clandestine journey teaches her, in part, how to want.

In vignettes that jump between periods of Jin’s life, Exhibit sketches a portrait of a woman at odds with the expectations placed on her. Once intent on surrendering her life to the Lord, she loses her faith during her college years—yet unlike the fanatical cult devotee at the center of Kwon’s first novel, The Incendiaries, Jin isn’t led to violence by her disillusionment. Photography offered one path to catharsis for Jin’s spiritual crisis: She made large-scale triptychs depicting “lustful pilgrims who, for a sight of the desired face, will trek land, beg, hope, abjure, living discalced.” These snapshots, which sublimate her prior devotion, anchored a buzzy solo exhibition—and, months later, still attract the ire of religious zealots who deemed it sacrilegious. As Jin wrestles with public accusations of blasphemy, she also feels the weight of a rift with her mother, who refused to attend her daughter’s secular wedding. The mother-daughter scenes are some of the novel’s most affecting, showing the ripple effects of Jin’s selfish rebellions outside the narrow domains of romance or religion. That familial titles—mother, father—are written only in Hangul deepens the sense of strained, diasporic intimacy.

[Read: The generational clash at Pride is actually a sign of progress]

Before the start of her relationship with Lidija, Jin had already spent years of her marriage outside the bounds of socially acceptable femininity: She never wanted to become a mother, and didn’t pretend otherwise. Often, she found, her refusal to have a child seemed to upset people—a judgment that did not extend to men, as no one had thought Philip was strange for not imagining himself a father when they’d married. For women, she concludes, the decision not to have children represents a fundamental rejection of the natural order, a defiance that could very well signal something more sinister: “People start asking, So, what else might this bitch think of doing?” Lidija observes in one of her many brisk, illuminating exchanges with Jin.

Jin’s queerness adds an additional layer to what she experiences as widespread suspicion of child-free women’s motives.  The novel channels—and reframes—a point that the author has made in her own life: In 2018, Kwon, who is married, came out as bisexual on Twitter. In an essay explaining this decision, Kwon wrote that the second-most-common lie about bisexual people is that “we’re unusually promiscuous, sexually greedy, incapable of monogamy. None of this is true.” Indeed, Exhibit takes great care to show that Jin’s bisexuality isn’t what compels her to cheat: Jin had slept with several women before meeting Philip, and publicly came out while married. The lust she feels for Lidija isn’t the result of lifelong queer repression; Jin’s destructive decisions are her own choices, not the supposedly innate pathology of all bisexual people. Jin is painfully aware of these attitudes, and of beliefs about queer people within her own community. Even when she’s acting reprehensibly, Jin still values pushing back against the dogma of elders who insist that queerness is a foreign plague afflicting white people, not Koreans.

Spending time with Lidija, a relationship that is clarifying and sacrosanct even as it sows deceit, offers Jin a reprieve from ill-fitting roles: dutiful daughter, reverent parishioner, self-sacrificing wife. With Lidija, Jin is neither a heretic nor a would-be mother. She’s a formidable artist, one whose dormant craft is reinvigorated by the freedom and inspiration she finds in another Korean American woman. Insulated from the power imbalances that restrict women’s lives, Jin can finally reckon with the role that power plays in sex. Providing Jin the pain she craves, the pain it took her so long to ask for, doesn’t give Lidija any pause. To Jin, the affair is a kind of revelation. “I’d leapt past shame to a fresh, unruled place,” she thinks.

Exhibit spends considerable time exploring how Jin’s and Lidija’s innermost desires are refracted through another damaging external lens: common racist stereotypes that portray Asian, and Asian American, women as naturally subservient. As a high-profile ballerina, “Lidija’s life relied, for the most part, on white people’s rating of bodies on the stage. Often, hers might be judged foreign.” Lidija couldn’t change how other people assessed her body. But she did, until her injury, have power over what it could achieve, and her penchant for control offstage is inextricable from her artistic mandate. Lidija, who has trained her own body to withstand pain, trains Jin’s body to do the same, and the indulgent interplay sparks something in both women.

With Lidija, Jin no longer has to hide, or apologize for her submission. But Jin still struggles to fully feel, much less publicly embrace, her love of kink, and as she considers the possibility of exhibiting self-portraits as a submissive, the thought inflames the same anxieties that had kept her from sharing this part of herself with her husband. Kink doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the racism that shapes so many other parts of American life can influence how people engage with it. Projecting images of her consenting to submission would still be “just what people expect, that I’ll be servile, quiet,” she tells Lidija. “I’ll add to the china-doll trope. It gets us killed.”

Exhibit treats both art and desire as serious pursuits, so the weighty proclamation doesn’t feel out of place in the women’s conversation. But Lidija doesn’t reflect the same anxiety back to Jin. Irreverent and self-assured, she challenges Jin’s timidity without dismissing the concern. The exchange is so tender that, for a moment, it’s tempting to forget that most secrets like theirs don’t stay hidden. No matter what becomes of the affair, though, Jin will emerge a different version of herself. Having ached for so long, she’s transformed by the thrill—and peril—of getting what she wants. Exhibit’s unflinching portrayal asks what we might learn from confronting some of the reasons for her stasis. Jin’s misdeeds are fictional, but the societal constraints she faces exist well outside the novel’s pages.

The launches come a day after the United States and South Korea conducted joint fighter jet drills.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.  

This week, a range of political headlines continue to raise questions about the looming presidential election. The adult-film star Stormy Daniels took the stand in the third week of former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial. The prolonged developments in Trump’s trial have prompted some Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, to consider the possibility of a sitting president facing an open indictment.

Meanwhile, Governor Kristi Noem, rumored to be a potential vice-presidential candidate for Trump, has abruptly ended the book tour for her memoir, No Going Back, published this month. Noem has faced a series of bruising interviews since the book’s release, especially regarding passages about the killing of her 14-month-old dog and a claim that she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Debate over Trump’s choice for vice president remains open, with names such as Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina still in the ring.

On the campaign trail, both President Joe Biden and Trump are contending with what a viable third-party candidate could mean for their chances this November. At the center of these discussions is the presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who also reportedly confirmed that a dead worm was found in his brain more than a decade ago—and whether his impact in swing states like Michigan could chip away at Biden’s bid for reelection.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Elaina Plott Calabro, a staff writer for The Atlantic; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News; and Vivian Salama, a national politics reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

Kim Ki-nam led the effort to prop up North Korea's totalitarian dynasty with powerful cults of personality.

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If Kristi Noem never actually met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, then how did that anecdote make it into her memoir? The answer, after these three stories from The Atlantic:

It’s not a rap beef. It’s a cultural reckoning. Trump flaunts his corruption. Who really has brain worms?

The Art of the Check

The newsletter you’re reading right now was reviewed by a fact-checker named Sam. Sam spent about an hour this afternoon scrutinizing my words and sentences, and making sure the quotes from my interviews match my recordings. You know what probably didn’t get that kind of review? The book on your nightstand. Or, as it happens, Noem’s new memoir.

Book publishers don’t employ fact-checking teams, and they don’t require a full fact-check before publication. Instead, a book is usually reviewed only by editors and copy editors—people who shape the story’s structure, word choice, and grammar. An editor might catch something incorrect in the process, and a lawyer might examine some claims in the book to ensure that the publisher won’t be sued for defamation. But that’s it. University presses typically use a peer-review process that helps screen for any factual errors. But in publishing more broadly, no one checks every date, quote, or description. It works this way at all of the Big Five publishers, which include HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette, and Macmillan. (None of these publishers responded to my requests for comment.)

Whaaat?! you might be thinking, spitting that Thursday glass of merlot all over your screen as every book you’ve ever read flashes before your eyes. Was it all a lie? The answer is no. But books absolutely do go out into the world containing factual errors. For most books, and especially for memoirs, “it’s up to the author to turn in a manuscript that is accurate,” Jane Friedman, a publishing-industry reporter, told me.

A few writers will go out and pay for their own fact-checker. Many don’t—including, evidently, Noem, who, as you may have heard by now, shot her dog in a gravel pit. That incident, which the South Dakota governor wrote about in her memoir, No Going Back, seems to be true. But a passage about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is probably not. In the book, Noem claims to have met Kim during a congressional trip where he “underestimated” her. At least one former congressional staffer has said that that meeting never happened. And after being questioned about it, Noem’s office said it would be correcting a few errors in the book.

A simple fact-check could have prevented this particular embarrassment for Noem: A checker would have called others who were part of the delegation to verify whether the meeting had taken place. So why don’t publishers fact-check, to avoid this problem in the first place? From the publisher’s perspective, hiring a team of checkers is “a huge expense,” Friedman said—it would “destroy the profitability” of some books. And there are logistical challenges: Fact-checking memoirs, for example, can be difficult, because you’re dealing with people’s memories. But magazines do it all the time.

If authors want their work checked, they generally have to pay for it themselves. Many of my Atlantic colleagues have hired fact-checkers to review their books. But the process is cumbersome and expensive—the editorial equivalent of an “intensive colonoscopy,” as one colleague described it to me recently. The checker pores over every word and sentence of the book, using multiple sources to back up each fact. She listens to all of the author’s audio, reviews transcripts, and calls people to verify quotes. The whole process can take several weeks. One fact-checker I spoke with charges $5,000 to $8,000 for a standard nonfiction book. Others charge more. It makes sense, then, that, as Friedman said, the number of authors who opt for independent fact-checking “is minuscule.”

So what of Noem’s book? Her publisher, Center Street, which is a conservative imprint of Hachette, had a decision to make when the error was discovered: It could conduct an emergency recall of Noem’s books, pulling all of them back from bookstores and Amazon warehouses around the country, and print new, accurate copies, Kathleen Schmidt, a public-relations professional who writes the Substack newsletter Publishing Confidential, explained to me. But that would have been incredibly difficult, she said, given the logistics and extreme expense of both shipping and paper. Center Street issued a statement saying it would remove the Kim anecdote from the audio and ebook versions of No Going Back, as well as from any future reprints. (Noem’s team did not reply to a request for comment about her fact-checking process.)

This means that, for now, Noem’s book, which was officially released on Tuesday, will exist in the world as is. Many people will buy it, read it, and accept as fact that Noem once met—and was underestimated by—Kim Jong Un.

Books have always had a certain heft to them—sometimes literally, but also metaphorically. We tend to believe a book’s contents by virtue of their vessel. “People might be a little less likely to do that if they understood that the publisher is basically just publishing whatever the author said was correct,” Friedman told me.

Maybe this latest incident will spark a change in the publishing industry—but it probably won’t. For now, people should think critically about everything they read, remembering, Friedman said, “that [books] are fallible—as fallible as anything else.”

Related:

The blurb problem keeps getting worse. The wrath of Goodreads

Today’s News

Last night, President Joe Biden said that if Israel launches a large-scale invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, the U.S. would stop supplying Israel with certain weapons and artillery shells. House Democrats overwhelmingly joined Republicans in rejecting Representative Majorie Taylor Greene’s motion to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. Barron Trump, Donald Trump’s 18-year-old son, was selected to be a Florida delegate at the Republican National Convention, where he will participate in nominating his father for president.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Scientists are debating whether concepts such as memory, consciousness, and communication can be applied beyond the animal kingdom, Zoë Schlanger writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: 50 years ago, the architect Peter Blake questioned everything he thought he knew about modern building, Sam Fentress writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Vartika Sharma for The Atlantic

A Fundamental Stage of Human Reproduction Is Shifting

By Katherine J. Wu

In recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.

Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

The Atlantic

Listen. The trailer for How to Know What’s Real, a new season of the How To podcast series (out on Monday). Co-hosts Megan Garber and Andrea Valdez explore deepfakes, illusions, misinformation, and more.

Read. The writer dream hampton thinks hip-hop is broken. But she can’t stop trying to fix it, Spencer Kornhaber wrote last year.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A ton of inbreeding is required to produce purebred dogs—and it’s causing serious health problems for them, according to a recent New York Times column by Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist. Your Frenchie’s parents are likely more closely related than half-siblings! Your golden retriever might have parents that are genetically as close as siblings! Such inbreeding has consequences: A pug’s skull shape makes breathing difficult. German shepherds are prone to hip dysplasia. “As a species, we are so attached to the idea that we should be able to buy a dog who looks however we like—flat of face or fancy of coat—that we are willing to overlook the consequences” for them, Horowitz writes.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

“I’m not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders. I’m just not going to do that. This anecdote shouldn’t have been in the book and as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted.”
— South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, in response to questions about a meeting she claimed to have had with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Truth: My Life, How It Really Happened, and What It Means for America—for which I conducted more than 500 hours of interviews with myself—contains an anecdote in which the late Samuel Beckett mails me his Nobel Prize for Literature medal and insists, in a long and heartfelt letter, that I deserve it more than he does. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir Just the Facts: Everything I Ever Did and the Order I Did It In—for which I embedded with myself on a series of dangerous solo military missions—contains an anecdote in which, after a boozy lunch with King Charles III, I invent the iPod. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir You Better Believe It: All My Realest Adventures—for which I accompanied myself on many trips to palaces, embassies, medieval mountain hideaways, global HQs, elite conferences, celebrity meditation retreats, and secret underwater laboratories—contains an anecdote in which I win Season 14 of Survivor but turn down a subsequent offer (from Jeff Probst himself) to host the show. This anecdote has been adjusted.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir The Honesty Gospel—for which I observed myself over seven sessions of ketamine therapy, supervised by myself—contains an anecdote in which I am visited by the archangel Gabriel. No adjustment has been made to this anecdote.

It has been brought to my attention that my memoir No BS: Straight Talk From the Mouth of Reality—for which I spent several months on the set of a documentary about me, directed by me, and starring (as me) both Steve Martin and Eva Longoria—contains an anecdote in which I ask the late J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Listen, Bob, are you sure you want to split the atom?” This anecdote has been adjusted.